Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

‘Penny Dreadful’ Recap: Up and Down the Ladder of Wealth

By Eric Grode May 11, 2014 11:05 pmMay 11, 2014 11:05 pm

Photo

Harry Treadaway in "Penny Dreadful."Credit Jonathan Hession/Showtime

Early on in Showtime’s premiere episode of “Penny Dreadful,” a pallid spiritualist named Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) confronts Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) after his third-rate Wild West show comes through London in 1891. She fact-checks his tale of surviving the Battle of the Little Bighorn 15 years earlier and then subjects him to a bit of character analysis. There’s the tell-tale trembling hand of the alcoholic and the contusion that probably came from a cuckolded husband. But she mainly zeros in on Ethan’s “expensive watch but threadbare jacket,” along with a nice pair of boots that he has had resoled several times.

Now, any fan of highbrow horror will think back to Hannibal Lecter taking in his inquisitor’s “good bag and cheap shoes” in “The Silence of the Lambs.” But Vanessa seizes on these sartorial discrepancies as a signifier of Ethan’s having come from (and then come down from) relative wealth.

“Penny Dreadful” uses a lurid pay-cable setup (dismemberings galore, a bout of quickie stand-up sex after Ethan’s show) to set up what might end up being a keen commentary on the fluidity of class in Victorian London — or might just as easily degenerate into a mirthless gorefest. It’s set just a few months after the last of the 11 unsolved Whitechapel murders, which have been ascribed by many to Jack the Ripper, and we see the unspeakable results of a similar maiming midway through the episode, named “Night Work.” The top-hatted swells cluster around broadsheet newspapers trumpeting “Is Jack Back?,” while the lower classes (including Ethan) get their information by clustering in terror outside the befouled address.

“Do you believe in the demimonde?” Vanessa later asks Ethan after his sharp-shooting skills have helped bring them into contact with, in order, an opium den; a tormented African explorer named Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton); a trio of bad guys with superhuman strength and gleaming eyes; a meat hook plunged through a man’s face; a large room dripping with body parts; and, finally, a hulking bald beastie with fangs, an exoskeleton in lieu of skin and hieroglyphics from the Egyptian Book of the Dead printed all over it.

In an hour packed with interesting developments, the least is probably the drawn-out issue of whether Ethan will join Vanessa and Sir Malcolm in their grisly travels. If Vanessa’s assumptions are right about Ethan’s origins, he has already shifted from the respectable world into the demimonde.

While Ethan is presumably getting accustomed to rougher clothes, another character is sprucing himself up, albeit begrudgingly. After dispatching that fanged behemoth, the three heroes bring the corpse to the realm of the “resurrection men,” or body snatchers. The body catches the eye of a prickly vivisectionist who instantly perks up at the sight of the bizarre find.

Sir Malcolm later sends a set of evening clothes and an Explorers Club invitation to the home of that young doctor. At the club, he asks the man to join him in searching for his daughter, Mina, who has been taken by vague dark forces. The doctor, all but yanking at his starched collar like Rodney Dangerfield, launches into a speech about shedding all this pomp and focusing instead on “piercing the tissue that separates life from death.” (If the ubiquitous “Penny Dreadful” ads hadn’t made it clear that we’re dealing with a very young Victor Frankenstein, this speech should do the trick.) He can’t shed the fancy clothes fast enough, fleeing to the suitably grotty-looking laboratory where his monster is about to be born. It’s only when these characters get their hands dirty that any work – and night work is the only kind of work in this world – gets done.

A few other things:
•At one point, Vanessa’s inscrutable demeanor cracks a bit. “Was I not responsible?” she asks Sir Malcolm when she hears that Mina – or an apparition resembling Mina – has reappeared. “But for my transgression, would any of this have occurred?” Any of what?! Whatever it is, it’s enough to send a few hundred spiders out of her crucifix (and flip it upside down, to boot) the next time she goes to pray in front of it.

•Her gifts of perception take a bit of a hit when she pegs Ethan as “a man much more complicated than he likes to appear,” which is pretty much exactly how every man likes to appear.

•Speaking of Ethan’s appearance, it seems clear that belly laughs will be in short supply in “Penny Dreadful.” So let’s savor bits like the sight of a post-show Ethan peeling his prosthetic handlebar mustache off his real mustache.

•The director, J.A. Bayona (“The Orphanage”), takes his time unspooling and then springing his scares, which is a bit of a luxury these days. Sir Malcolm and Frankenstein each get a lingering “put character in creepy setting, pan away from likely scare spot, pan back while deferring the scare a bit longer, pan away again, then BOO!” tracking shot, and they’re both really effective.

With just eight episodes to work with, “Penny Dreadful” is throwing a lot of balls in the air. Will it have time to catch them all and still introduce a few new ones (including Dorian Gray) – and even find time for Vanessa to crack a smile? And can we please get more of the foppish Egyptologist played by Simon Russell Beale, supported heavily by a hairstyle that manages to incorporate both Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka and an Oompa-Loompa? Leave your comments here.